In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

This is more of an "end of year" geonews in batch mode! Everything pertinent found in the last two weeks that we haven't shared yet. I wish you an excellent holiday break. We'll be back in January. You can still send in your contributions.

From the Google front:

• A summary entry on everything Google Maps/Earth and Santa Claus and another one on holiday trees in 3D
• More details on Google Maps 5.0 for Android
• Paris gets major 3D enhancements in Google Earth
• Google Kills (beta) Location Alerts Feature in Latitude
• Google now offers a 3D Body Browser
• There also was an imagery update in the middle of the month

From the ESRI front:

• ESRI Confirms 400 million user-genenerated maps on ArcGIS.com in October

From the open data / open source front:

• Via the geodata list, I learned about the 2010 U.S. Census TIGER/Line Shapefiles starting to become available, and it's also available from WeoGeo
• OpenLayers gets a new Bing Tiles layer
• Natural Earth map data in the public domain
• An entry on Geocoding Github: Visualizing Distributed Open-Source Development
• An O'Reilly article on Ushahidi enabling crowdsourced journalism and intelligence
• rgeo, a new geo library for Rails
• Here's a new project named GeoApt Spatial Data Browser
• The OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.3.2 released
• An entry on QGIS 1.7's vector rule editor and polygon line styles

From the Microsoft front:

• Bing Maps REST Services now supports transit routes

In the miscellaneous category:

• SS informs us Russia Launched a Geospatial Data and Earth Imagery Portal
• V1 offers their geospatial top 10 of 2010, DM also have their own geospatial top 10
• Here's a new augmented reality app that translate text that you see
• Still in the AR topic, an entry on how Kinect democratizes augmented reality
• Two Slashdot entries on 3D printing: MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D Printer Assembly and Cheap 3D Fab Could Start an Innovation Renaissance
• Still on the 3D topic, Researchers Develop Genuine 3D Camera
• TanDEM-X is now operational

In the maps category:

• Here's visualization of Wikileaks mirrors around the world
• A colleague sent me a link to the BBC Facebook connections map the world
• An Interactive Map of Diabetes in the U.S.
• Don't we all dream, here's an Atlas of Remote Islands

And the almost-off-topic link of the week, an amazing 4-minutes animation of the last 200 years of global history